Blackjack (17 page)

Cross moved his thin lips in a gesture some might mistake for a smile.

CROSS ENTERED
the basement of a tenement. With the aid of a pencil flash held in his teeth, he quickly located the telephone junction box. He lightly touched each pair of connectors with a wandlike device held in one gloved hand. When the wand rewarded his efforts with a greenish glow, he attached a pair of alligator clips, both wired to a handheld phone.

When he heard a dial tone, Cross held a small tape recorder to the mouthpiece and pushed a button. The recorder played a series of tones.

The number he just “dialed” rang.

“Allô,”
a man answered.

“C’est fini,”
the recorder’s voice said. Unhurriedly, Cross disconnected the clips, pocketed everything, and left, as ghostlike as he had entered.

As he exited the building through the basement door, the passenger-side window of the Shark Car sitting across the alleyway zipped its side window down and up again: All Clear.

IT WAS
the same newsreader, on the same channel Cross had watched in Red 71. The broadcast was coming into the War Room. The blond man yelled over to Wanda, “Get me …”

“Already on it,” she replied.

AS THE
members of Unit 3 evaluated the information that was pouring over their terminals about the serial killer’s suicide—“Or was it murder?”—the Shark Car slipped through the city.

“He’s here,” Wanda said.

“Still wearing his special little coat?” Percy said, his voice heavy with suppressed anger.

“No searches,” the blond man warned. “We’re fully operational now.”

“Fully
rogue
operational,” Percy reminded him.

“We can do it,” the blond man answered. “And once we bring … whatever the hell it is … once we bring it in, we’ll be properly acknowledged, don’t worry about that.”

“Maybe by the people you work for,” Tiger replied. “Me, I’m not on your payroll—I’ve got my own scores to settle, remember?”

Tracker was silent. Why repeat that which has already been said?

INSIDE THE
War Room, the blond man tried to project an air of assurance. “We can make it happen.”

“And you want me to take your word for it?” Cross responded, his face a blackboard immune to the blond man’s chalk.

In the silence that followed, Cross reached into the depths of his coat. Before Percy could level the MAC-10 he instinctively pulled, Cross held up a pack of cigarettes.

“No smoking in here,” Wanda told him, wishing she had made the statement the last time this cold man had paid them a visit—she knew it was much more difficult to reclaim territory once ceded.

“I didn’t light it,” Cross pointed out. “I just wanted to share tobacco.” With that, he offered the pack to Tracker, who was seated behind him. Tracker carefully extracted a single cigarette before he tossed the pack over Cross’s shoulder, confident that it would be caught.

“What the hell was
that
all about?” Percy demanded.

“You would not understand,” Tracker told him.

“Try me.”

“You don’t want that,” Tracker said.

“You sure?” Percy fired back.

“Stop it!” Wanda snapped. “When this is all over, you—
all
of you—can do whatever you want, okay?”

“Yes, mistress,” Tiger giggled.

CROSS, TRACKER
, and Tiger were deep in conversation, with Percy occasionally contributing. The blond man was off somewhere with Wanda. If their absence was a source of concern to those remaining, it didn’t show.

“You’ve got a complete record of their hits?” Cross asked.

“No way we could,” Percy said, blunt-voiced. “It’s not like they’re subtle about who did the ones we know about, but we gotta figure there’s bodies that haven’t turned up yet. They’re probably out making a bunch more while we’re sitting here.”

“What about that thing … with the dogs. There’s something there; I just can’t pull it out,” Tracker said.

Cross felt the current just released. “They ever kill cats?”

“Not house cats,” Tiger told him. “Maybe a jungle cat, we couldn’t say for sure. But we found plenty of bodies with regular cats around them … and the cats were still alive.”

“That’s the hook,” Cross said. “They don’t care about—”

“Who?” Percy leaned forward.

“Cats. Cats don’t bond to humans the way dogs do. Whoever they are, they only hunt humans. In at least
some
of all those other kills you told me about, dogs were hacked too. The killers came for the humans and the dogs tried to protect
them. Nothing personal to the killers—the dogs just got in the way.”

“Silent whistle,” Tiger said, almost to herself.

“Hearing range, yeah,” Cross picked up her thread. “I don’t know about cats, but dogs, no question they can hear harmonics humans can’t.”

“Dogs can hear them coming?” Percy asked, as if the whole picture was finally snapping into focus.

Cross shrugged. “It’d fit, right? The dogs hear … whatever this thing is. Or maybe they smell it. Either way, they go right into protection mode. But the humans they’re trying to protect wouldn’t get that message—they’d think the dogs were snarling at shadows.”

“That is why our people always had dogs,” Tracker confirmed. “But the … Simbas, if that’s who they are … there’s still something almost … clean about what they do. It is as if they only hunt hunters.”

“Or they only kill killers,” Cross narrowed it down.

“What about this one, then?” Percy challenged, pulling out an eight-by-ten photo of a signature-kill corpse hanging from a jungle gym in a kid’s playground. “This guy wasn’t even armed.”

Cross picked up the photo and studied the scene. Flipped it over, read the ID information on the back. “There’s info here,” he said. “Can any of you except Blondie’s girlfriend work that computer?”

Tiger shook her head. Tracker’s answer was silence.

“I can’t make it sing and dance the way that slope bitch does,” Percy said, “but I can get some basic stuff out of it. What do you want?”

“A BCI?”

“Can do,” Percy responded, planting his heavyweight body on Wanda’s stool. He started banging away immediately,
jeopardizing the keyboard with vicious two-finger blasts.

Cross lit a cigarette. So did Tracker.

Tiger said nothing. And missed nothing.

They waited.

“Son of a
bitch!
” Percy said, staring at the screen. “He was a goddamned pedophile.”

“A what?” from Tiger.

“Baby-raper,” Cross told her. “That’s what he was doing in that playground. Hunting. Stalking the ground, picking out a target. You understand?”

She nodded, a warrior’s stony mask dropping over her gorgeous features.

“And now
all
of us do,” Tracker added grimly.

THE BLOND
man and Wanda entered the War Room together. Wanda sniffed at the smell of smoke. But her annoyance instantly vanished at the far worse violation she detected: in her absence, someone had dared to touch her computer. Her dark eyes whipped around the van. Only Tiger reacted … with a fake-seductive wink.

“Learn anything?” the blond man asked.

Nobody answered.

“You know what we want,” the blond said to Cross. “And
you
want to see a grant of immunity all typed out and signed, with a blank space where the crime should be. With the same exact computer, printer, and paper that was originally used, so you end up with a perfect match. Okay, you’ve got it.”

“Sure I do.”

“What kind of proof could we possibly give you?”

Cross put two fingers against his jawline, as if he was
thinking it through. The blond man kept a barely veiled smug look on his fox-face.

Cross snapped his fingers with an “I’ve got it!” expression on his face. “If you’re really all that connected, you should be able to tell me where this guy is,” Cross said, pulling an old mug shot out of his coat.

“Who’s this?” Blondie asked.

“A baby-killer,” Cross told him. “A baby-killer with
real
immunity. New face, new name. He’s doing lightweight time … somewhere.”